Heated debate at Conway Hall

TEMPERS could have been frayed and voices raised when 100 people crowded into a room at Conway Hall, Holborn on Sunday to debate a fiery subject: Is climate change man-made?

But it was all very English and civilised when Piers Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, and Piers Forster, both physicists, went head to head. Piers Corbyn, who took his degree in theoretical physics at Imperial College, and runs a weather forecasting company, displayed a blown up plastic globe, pooh-poohing – with a screen presentation – the theory that climate change was man-made. Sea temperature had been rising for hundreds of years and this has increased CO2, he argued. And watch out – because in the next few years a very cold spell is coming. But Piers Forster, a leading physicist, whose team won a Nobel Peace Prize several years ago, blamed man for the rise of CO2.

Refereeing the match was Evan Parker, another physicist – he lives in Belsize Park – who declared at the end of a two-hour discussion that a slight majority believed climate change was man-made.